In the seminary of Sogorb, silence reigns in the middle of the morning. The sun warms the facade and there is a man at a window. “Here we are”, he says from above. After a minute he goes down to the yard, dressed in work clothes and a cap, the one he was wearing on Thursday when his wife called him running to come home. “He said to me: ‘Come on, they’re making us go away’. And I stopped what I was doing, I had these pants full of cement up to the top. It’s still good that I was able to wash them here”, explains l’Escandril, the nickname of this La Artejuela resident, displaced by the fire and one of the 1,600 people who have remained outside their homes since Thursday, when the mountain began to burn in Alt Millars, in the interior of Castelló.
Extinguishing teams are working non-stop with 22 aerial and 500 ground vehicles to try to control the fire, which is entering “decisive hours” given the forecast of westerly winds expected for tomorrow that could, once again, strengthen the flames
Seven days already out of the house and starting to weigh more than expected. “Everyone manages it as best they can, but now the discourse has changed. It’s been a long time,” laments the man, who is staying with his wife and her three children. “I know the mountain well, and for years, decades!, we have been warning that the mountain needs to be cleaned, we see it after the snowfall or when we go to look for firewood. That was a blast!” he declares. And he affirms, distressed, that “preventing a fire costs ten times less than putting it out”.
At the moment, around 4,600 hectares of territory of great ecological value are affected, in an approximate perimeter of 55 kilometers which, luckily, does not affect the natural park of Espadà, but the threat remains intact.
On Monday afternoon, there were several psychologists who attended to the evicted, social workers are providing care, as well as Red Cross volunteers, who at the Citizen Service Center in the Sogorb multi-sports pavilion provide care and organize meals for people affected by the fire that started in Vilanova de la Reina. Tina Tamborero is from there, a resident of La Pobla d’Arenós since she retired and left her beloved Barcelona, ??where her family will be coming from next week. “This is what I think, that this happens soon, that my grandchildren are coming and I want to go home”, he explains. Yesterday he went out to buy a book “to not think too much”. In the end, among many recommendations, David Safier’s “Damn Karma” was taken. “That’s how I’m entertained, since we don’t have television here either…”. The cell phone notifications don’t stop ringing, neither do the calls. Her husband is attending to the needs of the town as deputy mayor and is constantly updating it.
This is the sorrow they carry, which grows when they see videos like the one that went viral on Monday, with the flames threatening Montant. “It hurt a lot among the evicted, they were very bad after seeing it,” explains Juan Castañer, who is in charge of the seminar, which they can enter and leave. There is no entry control and, instead, a lot of hospitality. “The bishop of Sogorb already offered it in the fires of Begís and Soneja, in which he said ‘open doors'”. The center is also a children’s school, so the boys and girls occasionally parade around the yard in front of the excited gaze of those who spend their hours there.
Like Mari, from La Pobla, who answers the phone all the time, or Antonio and Montse, from La Monzona, who regularly go out to walk their dog, Rasta. Her house – “the only one we own”, she explains – is very close to an area particularly frequented during holidays, where the cold water refreshes in the summers that start to be too hot and the mountains tower over a place still beautiful “Many people have called us to offer us help, we could go with our children to Madrid and Mallorca, but we want to be here, giving strength to each other”, says Montse excitedly, remembering how until and the entire wallet in the area calls him every day to see what they need. return home
